The Road to Los Angeles (12 page)

And such women! It took my breath away to even see them rolling by in big cars, so poised, so beautiful, so easily at home in all that wealth, their cigarettes tipped so elegantly, their teeth so polished and flashing, the clothes they wore so irresistible, covering them with such perfection, concealing every body flaw, and making them so perfect in loveliness. At noon when the big cars roared down the road past the cannery and we were outside for the lunch hour I used to look at them like a thief peeking at jewels. Yet they seemed so far away that I hated them, and hating them made them nearer. Some day they would be mine. I would own them and the cars that carried them. When the revolution came they would be mine, the subjects of Commissar Bandini, right there in the Soviet district of San Pedro.

But I remember a woman on a yacht. She was two hundred yards away. At that distance I could not see her face. Only her movements were plain as she walked the deck like a pirate queen in a brilliant white bathing suit. She walked up and down the deck of a yacht that stretched like a lazy cat in the blue water. It was only a memory, an impression to be got from standing at the can dump and looking out the door. Only a memory, but I fell in love with her, the first real woman I ever loved. Occasionally she paused at the rail to look down into the water. Then she walked again, her luxurious thighs moving up and down. Once she turned and stared at the sprawling cannery. For some minutes she stared. She could not see me, but she looked directly at me. In that instant I fell in love with her. It must have been love, and yet it might have been her white bathing suit. From all angles I considered it, finally admitting that it was love. After looking at me, she turned and paced again. I am in love, I said. So this is love! All day I thought about her. The next day the yacht was gone. I used to wonder about her, and though it never seemed important, I was sure I was in love with her. After a while I ceased to think of her, she became a memory, a mere thought to while away the hours at the can dump. I loved her though; she never saw me, and I never saw her face, but it was love for all that. I couldn't make myself believe I had loved her either, but I decided that for once I was wrong, and that I did love her.

Once a beautiful blonde girl entered the labeling room. She came with a man who had an elegant mustache and wore spats. Later I found out his name was Hugo. He owned the cannery, as well as one on Terminal Island and another in Monterey. Nobody knew who the girl was. She clung to his arm, sickened by the odor. I knew she didn't like the place. She was a girl of not more than twenty. She wore a green coat. Her back was perfectly arched, like a barrel stave, and she wore high white shoes. Hugo was examining the place coldly, appraising it. She whispered to him. He smiled and patted her arm. Together they walked away. At the door the girl turned to look at us. I put my head down, not wanting to be seen by one so lovely among those Mexicans and Filipinos.

Eusibio was next to me on the can dump.

He nudged me and said, "You like, Arturo?"

"Don't be a fool," I said. "She's a slut, pure and simple, a capitalistic slut. Her day is finished when the revolution comes."

But I never forgot that little girl with her green coat and high white shoes. I was sure I would meet her again some day. Perhaps after I became rich and famous. Even then I wouldn't know her name, but I would hire detectives to shadow Hugo until they came to the apartment where he kept her, a virtual prisoner in his stupid wealth. The detectives would come to me with the address of the place. I would go there and present my card.

"You don't remember me," I would smile.

"Why no, I'm afraid not."

Ah. Then I would tell her of that visit she made to the Soyo Fish Company in the years gone by. How I, a poor white lad among that pack of ignorant Mexicans and Filipinos, was so overcome by her beauty that I dared not show my face. Then I would laugh.

"But of course you know who I am now."

I would lead her to her bookshelf, where my own books were to be seen among a few indispensable others, such as the bible and the dictionary, and I would draw out my book Colossus of Destiny, the book for which I had been given the Nobel Prize.

"Would you like me to autograph it?"

Then, with a gasp, she would know.

"Why, you're Bandini, the famous Arturo Bandini!"

Haw. And I would laugh again.

"In the flesh!"

What a day! What a triumph!

Chapter Fifteen

A MONTH PASSED, with four pay checks. Fifteen dollars a week.

I never got used to Shorty Naylor. For that matter, Shorty Naylor never got used to me. I couldn't talk to him, but he couldn't talk to me either. He was not a man to say, Hello, how are you? He merely nodded. And he wasn't a man to discuss the canning situation or world politics. He was too cold. He kept me at a distance. He made me feel as if I were an employee. I already knew I was an employee. I didn't see any need to rub it in.

The end of the mackerel season was in sight. An afternoon came when we finished labeling a two-hundred-ton batch. Shorty Naylor appeared with a pencil and a checking board. The mackerel were boxed, stenciled, and ready to go. A freighter was moored at the docks, waiting to carry them off to Germany — a wholesale house in Berlin.

Shorty gave the word for us to move the shipment out on the docks. I wiped the sweat from my face as the machine came to a stop, and with easy good-nature and tolerance I walked over to Shorty and slapped him on the back.

"How's the canning situation, Naylor?" I said. "What sort of competition do we get from those Norwegians?"

He shook the hand from his shoulder.

"Get yourself a hand truck and go to work."

"A harsh master," I said. "You're a harsh master, Naylor."

I took a dozen steps and he called my name. I returned.

"Do you know how to work a hand truck?"

I had no thought of it. I didn't even know hand trucks by such a name. Of course I didn't know how to work a hand truck. I was a writer. Of course I didn't know. I laughed and pulled up my dungarees.

"Very funny! Do
I
know how to work a hand truck! And you ask me that! Haw. Do I know how to work a hand truck!"

"If you don't - say so. You don't have to kid me."

I shook my head and looked at the floor.

"Do
I
know how to work a hand truck! And you ask me that!"

"Well, do you?"

"Your question is patently absurd on the face of it. Do I know how to work a hand truck! Of course I know how to work a hand truck. Naturally!"

His lip curled like a rat's tail.

"Where did you ever learn to work a hand truck?"

I spoke to the room at large. "Now he wants to know where I worked a hand truck! Imagine that! He wants to know where I learned to work a hand truck."

"All right, we're wasting time. Where? I'm asking you where?"

Like a rifle report I responded.

"The docks. The gasoline docks. Stevedoring."

His eyes crawled over me from head to foot, and his lip took several weary curls, a man utterly nauseated with contempt.

"You a stevedore!"

He laughed.

I hated him. The imbecile. The fool, the dog, the rat, the skunk. The skunk-faced rat. What did he know about it. A lie, yes. But what did he know about it? Him - this rat - with not one ounce of culture, who had probably never read a book in his life. My God! What could he ever know about anything? And another thing. He wasn't so big either, with his missing teeth and tobacco-juice mouth and eyes of a boiled rat.

"Well," I said. "I've been looking you over, Saylor or Taylor, or Naylor, or whatever the hell they call you down here in this stink-hole, I don't give a damn myself; and unless my perspective is completely awry, you're not so goddamn big yourself, Saylor, or Baylor, or Taylor, or Naylor, or whatever the hell your name is."

A foul word, too foul to repeat, oozed out of the side of his face. He scratched his checking board, making some sort of pretense not clear to me, but plainly a form of hypocrisy, a ruse from the depths of his brummagem soul, scratching away like a rat, an uncultured rat, and I hated him so much I could have bitten off his finger and spat it in his face. Look at him! That rat, making ratty little scratches on a piece of paper like a piece of cheese with his ratty little paws, the rodent, the pig, the alley rat, the dock rat. But why didn't he say something? Ha. Because at last he had found his match in me, because he was helpless before his betters.

I nodded at the stack of cartoned mackerel.

"I see this stuff is bound for Germany."

"No fooling?" he said, scratching away.

But I didn't flinch under this plodding effort to be sarcastic. The witticism found no target upon me. Instead, I lapsed into a serious silence.

"Say Naylor, or Baylor, or whatever it is — what do you think of modern Germany? Do you agree with Hitler's Weltanschauung? "

No response. Not a word, merely a scratching. And why not? Because Weltanschauung was too much for him! Too much for any rat. It baffled, stupefied him. It was the first time and the last he would ever hear the word uttered in his life. I put the pencil in pocket and peered over my shoulder. He had to get up on his tiptoes to do it, he was such a preposterous dwarfed little runt.

"Manuel!" he called. "Oh Manuel! Come here a minute." Manuel came forward, scared, halting, because it was unusual for Shorty to address anybody by name, unless he was going to sack him. Manuel was thirty, with a hungry face and cheek bones protruding like eggs. He worked across from me on the can dump. I used to look at him a lot because of his huge teeth. They were as white as milk, but too big for his face, his upper lip not long enough to cover them. He made me think of teeth, and nothing else.

"Manuel, show this fellow how to work a hand truck." I interrupted. "It's scarcely necessary, Manuel. But under the circumstances, he gives the orders around here and, as they say, an order is an order."

But Manuel was on Shorty's side. "Come on," he said. "I show you."

He led me away, the foul words oozing from Shorty's mouth again, easy to hear.

"This amuses me," I said. "It's funny, you know. I feel like laughing. That poltroon."

"I show you. Come on. Boss's orders."

"The boss is a moron. He's dementia praecox."

"No no! Boss's orders. Come on."

"Very amusing in a macabre way — right out of Krafft-Ebing."

"Boss's orders. Can't help."

We went to the room where they were kept, and each of us dragged out a hand truck. Manuel pushed his into the clear. I followed. This was easy enough. So they were called hand trucks. When I was a kid we called them pushcarts. Anybody with two hands could work a hand truck. The back of Manuel's head was like the fur of a black cat shaved by a rusty butcher-knife. The growth was like a cliff: it was a Nome-made hair cut. The seat of his overalls was patched with a hunk of white canvas. It was badly sewed, as if he had used a hair pin and a length of string. His heels were worn down to the wet floor, the soles re-soled with wet fiber, held together by big nails. He looked so poor it made me mad. I knew a lot of poor people, but Manuel didn't have to be that poor.

"Say," I said. "How much do you make, for God's sake?"

The same as I. Twenty-five cents an hour.

He looked straight into my eyes, a tall lean man looking down, ready to fall apart, with deep dark honest eyes, but very suspicious. They had that whipped, melancholy cast of most all peon eyes.

He said, "You like cannery work?"

"It amuses me. It has its moments."

"I like. I like very much."

"Why don't you get some new shoes?"

"No can afford."

"You married?"

He nodded fast and hard, tickled to be married.

"Got any kids?"

And he was tickled about that too. He had three kids, because he raised three twisted fingers and grinned.

"How the hell do you live on two bits an hour?"

He didn't know. Lord, he didn't know, but he got by. He put his hand on his forehead and made a hopeless gesture. They lived, it wasn't much, but one day followed another and they were alive to see it.

"Why don't you ask for more money?"

He shook his head violently.

"Maybe get fired."

"Do you know what you are?" I said.

No. He didn't know.

"You're a fool. A plain, unmitigated, goddamn fool. Look at yourself! You belong to the slave-dynasty. The heel of the ruling classes in your groin. Why don't you be a man and go on strike?"

"No strike. No no. Get fired."

"You're a fool. A damn fool. Look at yourself! You haven't even got a decent pair of shoes. And look at your overalls! And by God, you even look hungry. Are you hungry?"

He wouldn't talk.

"Answer me, you fool! Are you hungry?"

"No hungry."

"You dirty liar."

His eyes dropped to his feet as he shuffled along. He was studying his shoes. Then he glanced at mine, which were better than his in every way. He seemed to be happy because I had the best shoes. He looked at my face and smiled. It made me furious. What was the sense in being glad about it? I wanted to punch him.

"Pretty good," he said. "How much you pay?"

"Shut your face."

We went along, I following him. All at once I got so mad I couldn't keep my mouth shut. "You fool! You laissez faire fool! Why don't you pull this cannery down and demand your rights? Demand shoes! Demand milk! Look at yourself! Like a boob, a convict! Where's the milk? Why don't you yell for it?"

His arms tensed on the handle-grips. His dark throat cabled with rage. I thought I had gone too far. Maybe there would be a fight. But it wasn't that.

"Keep still!" he hissed. "Maybe we get fired!"

But the place was too noisy, squealing of wheels and thumping of boxes, with Shorty Naylor a hundred feet away at the door busy checking figures and unable to hear us. And I saw how safe it was, I decided I wasn't through yet.

"What about your wife and kids? Those dear little babes? Demand milk! Think of them dying of hunger while the babes of the rich swim in gallons of milk! Gallons! And why should it be like that? Aren't you a man like other men? Or are you a fool, a nitwit, a monstrous travesty on the dignity that is man's primordial antecedent? Are you listening to me? Or are you turning your ears because the truth stings them and you are too weak and afraid to be other than an ablative absolute, a dynasty of slaves? Dynasty of slaves! Dynasty of slaves! You want to be a dynasty of slaves! You love the categorical imperative! You don't want milk, you want hypochondria! You're a whore, a slut, a pimp, a whore of modern Capitalism! You make me so sick I feel like puking."